


Made Out of Chain and Glass

by ParadifeLoft



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Flashbacks, Gen, mentions of torture, re-embodiment
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-21
Updated: 2013-02-21
Packaged: 2017-11-29 19:18:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 635
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/690512
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ParadifeLoft/pseuds/ParadifeLoft
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Centuries after his death, Celebrimbor's mother demands his release by the Valar from the Halls of Mandos… and gets her wish. Perhaps not how she might have wanted.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Made Out of Chain and Glass

“My son has suffered enough. He has taken no Oath. I want him released from your _prison_ , if you tell it true that you act out of justice and not from petty spite.”

She could almost see some of them bristle. But Námo yet looked unmoving as an etching in metal, a pattern in shards of coloured glass, gaze still fixed on her as it had been since she’d come before them in her finery and jewels and pride.

“As you request then, Princess,” he finally replied. “You shall have back your son.”

She smiled a small, pleasant smile, and ignored the slight. My most numerous thanks, her returning reply was, before her lowest bow and the turn on her heel that sent loose curls swirling around her shoulders.

——

He’d been centuries from his last tormented moments, no sensation able to reach him through all of them. Most of the time’d had a quality like the haze before falling into sleep, but he still knew it had been an age since he’d last felt, last thought.

This now with nary a warning sent him all those hundreds of years back and set him once more beneath the instruments of the Dark Lord.

His body and mind recoiled, eyes or thoughts or both conjuring visions of stone and earth and metal and blood, of burned and blackened holly trees strung with the dead flesh of his people. He began to scream again, and convulsed, yanking at the bonds against his wrists and ankles.

“ _Tyelperinquar_ ,” rang a sharp voice before him, above him, ringing in his ears. The yelling turned into a whine and he recoiled, curling in upon himself… how, how, should not be possible….

But the metal and rope cutting into his skin had vanished, and the visions of torture and death began to follow them, leeching away like thick dyes running clean from a basin with a stream of warm water.

The voice did not join them, sounding out again like a clanging bell calling with a powerful compulsion in the deep brassy note. “ _Tyelperinquar. Tyelpe!_ ”

The rest of the visions faded, but the light in their wake was bright enough to blind him. Something touched his shoulder and he flinched. _Go away go away go away go_

“There is nothing here to harm you,” he heard, authoritative but also tender, soft and close. The same as his old name. Not his father’s voice.

The blinding light seemed to recede, slowly, as the visions had before. His surroundings were not actually so bright, in truth. The cool stonework of the floor was not, at the very least. More lit with a pale greyish glow.

His gaze turned upward, and then. Then. A face he had not seen in near two ages, not before him like this. Deep grey, sharp bright eyes, and features sharp and strong as well, sharp as the cut of her collar and the coat over her dress; thick tied-back curls of hair the colour of beechwood soot.

She knelt, and embraced him then, even in full sight of the other figures who had stood behind her (both shining gold, one like Laurelin’s undimmed radiance, the other with swirls of a dark sorrow through his silhouette that made him want to look rapidly away). Her face buried against his shoulder, and her arms around him, and it felt strange, so strange, his skin and muscles still twinging and aching but he was whole, his flesh was whole and unblemished and he wrapped his own arms around her -

How foreign it felt, how strange and almost forgotten but for an empty longing knawing away at him through decades turned centuries. He squeezed his eyes shut once more and tried not to shake in his mother’s arms.

 _Why?_ , he thought.

_Why? Why?_

_Why?_


End file.
